Loulou & Yves

  FLORENCE TOUZAIN M. Bergé was jealous of the three people crucial to M. Saint Laurent in his daily life: Loulou, Mme. Muñoz and Betty Catroux. Within the house, M. Saint Laurent, Loulou and Mme. Muñoz were the three points of a triangle. Mme. Muñoz’s strength was hiring people for the studio with the right personality vis-à-vis M. Saint Laurent. He had a private office just off the studio where he took personal calls, but mostly he preferred to be with us, even if he rarely spoke.

  BRUNO MÉNAGER Anne-Marie was the grave, austere one. She and Loulou were dauntless, glued to each other in the month leading up to the collection, lunching together every day. If Mohammed didn’t come to the mountain, they went to him on rue de Babylone. Women in couture houses aren’t especially nice to each other, let alone praising. But Anne-Marie admired Loulou.

  ANNE-MARIE MUñOZ After every show, Loulou and I would go out for a walk, dead tired and blue, but already talking about the next collection.

  FRANÇOISE PICOLI “In fashion,” Anne-Marie Muñoz once told me, “you’re either out in front or in the shadows.” Neither of us had it in us to be out front. Loulou, yes.

  JüRGEN DOERING They were perfectly matched. One was made to be in the spotlight, one wasn’t. Anne-Marie didn’t have the body, wasn’t glib. Everyone has a part of him that wants to be a star, but she was shrewd. She saw the place she could fill and became somebody Saint Laurent absolutely couldn’t live without. Plus, she understood the vulnerability of being in the spotlight. What could be smarter than staying in the shadows in a land where everyone is jousting to be in the sun?

  Emotions ran high at avenue Marceau. I’m sure Loulou and Anne-Marie didn’t always see eye-to-eye, but they maintained their elegance and gave nothing away! You never heard one say of the other “Ouff, she gets on my nerves.” Never! And the politesse … “Loulou, voulez—vous … ?” “Anne-Marie, pensez-vous … ?”

  If Anne-Marie gave the impression of sacrificing her life for Saint Laurent, it was to fool the enemy. She had the modest air of une petite dame but was the only one who could go head-to-head with Bergé. He respected her for it. “A more intelligent person than Anne-Marie doesn’t exist,” he told me. She weighed in on what should go or stay in a collection, but unlike Loulou, she didn’t sketch, get her hands dirty or wrestle with creative ideas. “Why do we like gray today? What if we combine it with that and embroider it like this?” That was Loulou. M. Saint Laurent wasn’t the person I asked, “Do you think this is pretty?” Nonononononono. Loulou was the one you went to for real discussions of style and questions of pure creation.

  NICOLE DORIER Muñoz gave her life to Saint Laurent. He was invasive, encroaching.

  ANNE-MARIE MUñOZ I hadn’t sat down after walking through the door and the telephone would ring, in the morning, too, before I left for work, which was trickier because I had my children to take care of. We talked about corrections that needed to be made, and he gave me instructions, so we had time to prepare before he came in.

  PAQUITA PAQUIN When we went on vacation and she’d disappear for an hour, I knew that meant she was phoning Yves. For Anne-Marie, Saint Laurent was like a calling.

  76 Group of six anti-Wagner, anti-Debussy composers, including Georges Auric and Francis Poulenc.

  77 Christian Dior’s directrice du studio.

  78 Molière comedy.

  79 City in coastal Algeria, Saint Laurent’s birthplace.

  13

  Thadée—or Ricardo?

  THADÉE KLOSSOWSKI DE ROLA When [Loulou] returned [to Paris from New York], it happened that she was the best friend of the woman I was living with [Clara Saint]. It was [an] impossible [situation]. And adultery, what a bore! … [Loulou] had a very active sex and romantic life. She was a miracle of energy and strength. Me, I was poor and crazy in love with her.

  By 1972, Thadée had already been in love with Loulou for three years—and Clara was already worried Thadée would leave her. In Marrakech, as Loulou was about to take off for the desert with the architect Ricardo Bofill, Thadée stole a kiss in the gardens of the Mamounia hotel, “a kiss on her neck I wanted her never to forget.”

  RICARDO BOFILL I don’t like to look backward. Memories for me are flashes; they don’t last. An image, an atmosphere, a smell is fixed in time. I’m an architect. I always look forward.

  I met Loulou in Paris at a party Dalí gave at the Meurice. She’d been working at Saint Laurent for six months. She was completely out of the ordinary, no? She was—I don’t like the word “abnormal”—she was different. Unique. Huge personality. Enormous vitality. An immense desire to live, see, do … I was living in Fernando Sanchez’s flat, where Loulou and I would have so many wonderful, intense times.

  I was married—no, I’ve never been married in my life. Serena Vergano, an Italian film actress, and I were living together. In fact, we still do, here at La Fábrica.80 We’re very good friends. My two sons—Ricardo Junior with Serena, Pablo with a French woman, Annabelle d’Huart—work with me. The woman I live with now heads the interior design department. Saint Laurent had a clan; we’re like a clan, too.

  VIOLETA SANCHEZ Ricardo was not especially good-looking but extremely seductive, if you like that type of guy, one of those little Spanish machos who thought everyone was dying to sleep with him. Very sexy. Total Casanova. He would have done it with anybody.

  CAROLINE LOEB Ricardo was a hot architect, very charismatic. He thought he could have any woman he wanted. Vergano suffered his womanizing in Barcelona while he had this other life in Paris. She was the mamá you go home to.

  WILLY LANDELS I do indeed remember Ricardo Bofill. Dreadful architect. He built a fascist town somewhere outside Paris.

  CARSON CHAN It is enough to say that Ricardo Bofill is one of Europe’s most famous and prolific architects of the last century … more than 1,000 projects designed, over 300 of them built. In his portfolio are furniture designs, city plans, and everything in between. Stylistically, the range is just as wide. There’s social, utopian housing; Spanish coastal vernacular; modular metabolism; postmodernism; neo-Classicism …

  Bofill formed the Taller de Arquitectura (or Architecture Workshop) in 1960 as a collective concerned not only with architecture but also with urban planning, filmmaking, philosophy, writing, and sociology … As Franco’s ré gime organized and smothered the joys of daily living, the Taller countered it through its focus on housing design … Walden-7 (1975), built next to La Fá brica … made the Taller and Bofill into instant stars … [He] was to reshape society by exalting the lives of the masses … By the mid-1970s, Bofill had attained such acclaim for his strange geometries and bold hues that he had effectively become a brand.

  JACQUES GRANGE In 1972, Pierre and Yves invited me and François-Marie Banier to Marrakech for Easter. Loulou was there, Clara, Thadée—voilá, tactactac. I wasn’t in awe of Yves, but I was in awe of his taste, the universe it embraced: Jean-Michel Frank, 81 Art Deco, Marie-Laure de Noailles. When Marie-Laure’s estate was sold, I was just starting out. Yves bought more than anyone. I bought one object for Edmonde Charles-Roux.82

  The first time I worked for Yves was two years later, on his Paris “bachelor pad”—nothing to do with Pierre. It was all done over the phone, Yves telling me what he wanted. I was intimidated. Even if we loved the same things, he was the engine; I was just being pulled along. But the job was a success, I went on to do all his houses: Villa Oasis in Marrakech, Château Gabriel near Deauville, Villa Mabrouka in Tangier … Yves got anything he wanted. Pierre had only two words: “Do it.”

  That Easter, Loulou was very keyed up waiting for Ricardo. “Ricardo’s coming! Ricardo’s coming!!!” She was over the moon in love with him. We waited … and waited … and Pierre became annoyed. He was jealous, because Loulou and Ricardo were all anyone talked about. Andy Warhol was at the Mamounia with his tribe—Jed Johnson, Fred Hughes … Yves, all of us were excited to meet Warhol, but not Pierre. He was wary—“Who are these people?” But he quickly changed his mind. Yves’s portrait w
as commissioned on that trip.

  RICARDO BOFILL Les Saint Laurent were very protective of Loulou. They wanted everything for her. But being so possessive and controlling—especially Bergé—they were happy and at the same time not happy we were together. One time in Morocco, we took off for the Sahara without telling them—what hell that caused! In Marrakech, Yves was off in his own universe while his court stood by in attendance. He thought he was the Eighth Wonder of the World. God’s gift: great couturier, great artist—even a great writer! “Yves’s gone off to jot down a thought.” “Yves must be left alone to write.” Monstrous, monstrous ego.

  LOULOU [Marrakech] was one big holiday. We lived at night. We swam a little, but life began at teatime. Yves could dance on a table for four hours doing his one-man show. When you gave him a Camel, it affected him like a pipe of kif.

  Loulou had taken up her duties in the studio and was living with Yves and Pierre in a picturesque enfilade of maids’ rooms under the eaves of their rez-de-jardin duplex on rue de Babylone; she was also semi-installed at 6, rue Jacob, chez Clara and Thadée, sharing their bed. Loulou’s drinking—her preferred cocktail was vodka, crème de menthe and Fernet-Branca—worried Thadée and one of Loulou’s boyfriends, John Stefanidis, the London decorator.

  BEN BRANTLEY [John Stefanidis’s] friends describe him variously as the embodiment of English manners, Mediterranean temperament, French precision, Oriental contemplativeness, and the cosmic sense of order of classical Greece… He is a rigorously trim figure with an attenuated puckish flair, a carriage as straight as a rule, and a sartorial meticulousness.

  WILLY LANDELS I’ve always attributed John’s interest in both boys and girls to his Greek nature. The first time I heard about him was because of the daughter of a Neopolitan prince I knew. John was seeing his daughter and it had gone very, very far. This was in Milan in the early sixties, when John had an advertising agency, after he’d come down from Oxford. Loulou was devoted to him, and he was slightly in love with her. He would’ve married her. It wouldn’t have been a good idea. I saw John in love with yet another girl, Bianca Jagger.

  At Club Sept, Loulou fell between the tables, sending glasses crashing, and broke her shoe heel (which did not stop her from dancing with Bruce Chatwin). Once, she sat on a whiskey and soda. At Maxim’s, she tumbled from a chair in a puff of mousseline, landing in a position that revealed everything there was to know about Yves Saint Laurent’s new assistant. It was all grins and giggles—until daybreak and it was time to go home. Thadée and John recognized that in order to do so, she had to be falling-down drunk. Loulou was drunk even in Thadée’s dreams, “pathetic with her mouth pulled back in laughter, I woke up, I walked around the garden turning over this novel: about a couple who destroy each other, depraved mœurs, drug addiction …”

  Thadée’s dreams were drawn directly from his life. Pierre took him aside at a party at rue de Babylone, where there always seemed to be a porno film playing in the background, gay or straight, to say he’d found an “entire box” of cocaine Loulou must have left in his car. Thadée seemed concerned, but when Loulou complained of exhaustion and asked for pills to kill her appetite, he obliged, handing her “Heptamyl, what you give dogs for their hearts, they counter the depressive effect of neuroleptics, and a big glass of vodka-Campari and some Optalidons.”

  RICARDO BOFILL Loulou had two sides: the giddy party side, and the serious work side. With three hours sleep, she’d be up at eight to go to the studio. Huge reserves of energy. Because of this party-work, party-work, party-work rhythm, she was frantic.

  With Fernando Sanchez, Yves and Pierre Bergé in a drawing by Fernando, Marrakech, 1975. Fernando bought Yves and Pierre’s first house in Marrakech, Dar el Hanch, when they moved to Dar es Saada. © Jano Herbosch. Courtesy of the holder.

  BETTY CATROUX That was another big difference [between Loulou and me]: She worked while I went beddy-bye all day …

  I’m a complete good-for-nothing. I’ve done nothing my entire life. My only glory is that I attracted a genius like Yves … I don’t have any personal talent, but I have the talent to attract talent … Fortunately, I don’t take myself seriously. I’m very unaffected, you can give me that. Saint Laurent and I both loved talking nonsense. It’s what made us such good partners in crime, a couple of four-year-olds … During the day, he worked with Loulou, who was always upbeat. In the evening he’d call me—“Everything’s awful, I can’t go on, life is abominable”—and I’d outdo him: “Boy are you right! Life’s a nightmare. Let’s go crazy and forget it.” Loulou was the complete opposite. She saw everything through rose-colored glasses. She was our Prozac… Pierre Bergé hated me because he thought I was dangerous, a perverse influence on Saint Laurent … Obviously he really loved Loulou, who was an angel.

  MARY RUSSELL I left Glamour for Women’s Wear. Part of my job was hanging out with the Saint Laurent gang, dinner every night, then reporting back. Loulou’s value—she was part of the ballet of keeping Yves delighted, interested, entertained, distracted. I remember the crazy mother, Maxime, coming into the Sept completely drunk and falling on the floor. Loulou was—I was going to say she was embarrassed, but she wasn’t, because we were all having so much lovely champagne. Pierre made sure the bills were paid and that my boss, John Fairchild, was happy and the pictures appeared in Vogue and the money came in and the family stayed together and Yves made it to work and does everyone have their cigarettes? It was a lifestyle, amazing theater, like the Greeks, like Shakespeare, like Vreeland, its own “é cole de.” The star Loulou became—would you say that had anything to do with the job somebody like me and you did? And the zillions of dollars spent on ads in Vogue and The Times? Would you say it had to do with a story told about a person in a world where Yves Saint Laurent is king?

  BEN BRANTLEY Loulou was always the shiny one in that group, don’t you think? Glimmering in a way the others weren’t. Also the sharpest—well, Clara was sharp, too, but in a different way. Loulou was happy hedonism incarnate, a bright presence who laughed well and took a great picture, dancing on a table and showing her panties and garters on the front page of Women’s Wear. Loulou always looked incredibly smart, like a Deco—like an Erté illustration, do you know? Gleaming. Tight skin without a lift. Saint Laurent’s muse, the bohemian in a gypsy caravan: The press created and perpetuated those myths. Women’s Wear certainly did. “Fast Loulou” was her epithet. “Madcap Loulou.”

  JEAN-LUC FRANÇOIS It was Pierre who pushed for all those stories in the press, because he understood the beast must be fed. It doesn’t matter how sublime a muse you are, or whose—if the chatter stops, you disappear. Pierre didn’t know how to take Loulou, always walking on the tips of his toes. To him, she came from the moon. To her, he was a zombie.

  LOULOU I always went to work every day of my life, which probably saved me … I’ve always been fairly conscientious, oddly enough. I’ve never wanted to be kept by a man. I’ve always wanted to be independent and look after myself, so I think that makes one quite resilient in a way, and you sort of bounce back without quite knowing how.

  MICHEL KLEIN We called her “the Energizer Bunny,” because she was so speedy. Yves was more fragile. Pierre was there to make sure he didn’t go too far.

  PIERRE BERGé I don’t know how Yves and Loulou do it, going out night after night until seven in the morning… Yves does not have good health, but he drinks and can go on like that and still function the next day. I would have to sleep for days to recuperate. But Yves and Loulou are deceptive. They look wan and frail, but they have cores of metal inside.

  THADÉE KLOSSOWSKI DE ROLA [It was a] small world of people who drank a lot, who had a lot of fun, who traveled and worked nonstop—Yves did six collections a year, Loulou right there with him. I was the only one who did nothing. Well, I did work a couple of hours in the afternoon [editing the works of Georges] Bataille. But it was very satisfying watching the others rushing around with so much success …

  JEAN-CHRISTOPHE LAIZEAU Thad
ée doesn’t inhabit the same world as the rest of us. He’s quixotic. A lot of things, if you don’t help him, he’s lost. He lives like a nineteenth-century gentleman farmer.

  COLOMBE PRINGLE Thadée was so good-looking—and mysterious. People who don’t speak are supposed to be intelligent, so everyone thought he must be brilliant. His mysteriousness was well maintained. Having Balthus for a father helped. Thadée woke up at three every day, had lunch at Lipp, then went to a nightclub. But why would anyone want that life? What’s the fun in it? I don’t take drugs, so I haven’t any idea.

  NICOLE DORIER Thadée’s a social reject, a misfit: “the son of,” “the husband of,” but otherwise nothing. Maybe being manipulated didn’t suit him, and maybe it did, because he didn’t have the courage to take charge of his own life.

  SUSAN GUTFREUND I used to see Thadée and the rest of that crowd for weekends at Haar, the castle in Holland of Marie-Hélène de Rothschild’s brother, Teddy van Zuylen. He was reserved, always smiling. I can honestly say I don’t remember having anything more than a “Bonjour, how are you?” conversation with him—and we were staying in the same house.

  MICHEL KLEIN Thadée loves to be wooed, flattered, courted. He’s not a gigolo; he’s a shadow.